didn’t I hear a rumour the scottish parliament was going to get more tax raising powers as well, good news all round for McIndependence.

“had already noted that the election result and the Lib-Con coalition will be a great boost to Scottish independence.”

And that is a bad thing because…..???

the important question is, will the Scottish be included in the immigration cap?

Chris

No, it’s an excellent thing – I am entirely in favour. But it is an unintended consequence for Clegg and Cameron.

Just confirmation that the deal struck in the early 70′s has now expired.

We get all your oil and gas, in exchange for you ruining our Country.

Now eff off back to Scotland.

Tony

I propose they get to keep their oil, but in return they all have to wear England shirts during the world cup. Deal or no deal?

With the eviction of the final ever Scotch Prime Minister signals the return of Scotch irrelevance.

Hopefully England will be rid of you in the near future, no MP elected in the Scotch EU Region should EVER have any say over England ever again.

‘I propose they get to keep their oil, but in return they all have to wear England shirts during the world cup. Deal or no deal?’

Just like the lib dems…we will have to phone THE BANKER.

“I propose they get to keep their oil, but in return they all have to wear England shirts during the world cup. Deal or no deal?”

Deal!

Incidentally, this is what “Independence” means, in the English language at least:

in

Whit? D’ye no ken David William Donald Cameron’s a thistlonian an’a?

Wiki: “His father was born at Blairmore School near Huntly in Scotland. The school was built by his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Geddes, who had made a fortune in the grain business in Chicago and had returned to Scotland in the 1880s. The Cameron family were originally from the Inverness area of the Scottish Highlands.”

It’s a conspiracy, a tell ye!

PS. Scotch is a type of whisky, not a nationality. We missed our chance of a true Scotch PM: Charlie Kennedy.

Craig, there are only a few million of you (you’re still proportional!) and all your talent should be migrating to Holyrood as it gains more and more powers?

Plus we avoid the utterly cringe-worthy moments when Gordo is photographed sitting down to support England at the World Cup.

I am a bit surprised (Aye Right!) at the tone of some of the commenst above and their anti Scots remarks.

If this is what is meant by the UK then the sooner we leave the better!

And I voted Lib Dems to keep the Tories out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1tJJO_pVvQ

Craig Evans

I agree. You see, it’s working already propelling us towards independence!

Look, some of my best friends are Scottish…

Can I just underline an important comment by Terry in an earlier post;

- 20 Libdems in cabinet give the government a majority, whatever Libdem backbenchers do.

- the plan is to make 55% the threshold for a no-confidence vote.

The new politics is looking rather post-democratic.

If I’m not mistaken it seems PeterL is suggesting that Liberal Democrat MPs will value their ministerial salary above their personal integrity. How very dare you!

brian

craig on 12:37 PM 07/05/10

‘Remember 1974 – Let’s Stay in Opposition’ thread.

‘Resist the tempations of instant power and ministerial limousines’

Didn’t manage that one, did they.

Och, come oan tae grips, whit’s new? Ah ken white ye mean, Craig ma man, grantit. Liam Fox huis a hyperemetic effect on me. He wis in the Year above me in Medicine at Glesga Uni; e’en then, wur talkin the uber-Thatcher era, he wis ae seekin the limelicht. Now, in ma view, the mon’s a hard state junkie. If ye passed him in the street, ye might weil confuse him wi a Trident missile. Nuhin chynges.

Fixed term parliaments of five years and making 55% the threshold for a no-confidence vote are both important and contentious constitutional changes that were not in either party’s manifesto and are being introduced without a referendum. So why are we having a referendum on AV?

Craig

is OK, I obviously misread the way you wrote it, it looked a bit doom and gloomish.

I would guess that full independence would make a lot of Scots and English happy

McNabbed, aye yer richt, but Camy’s wan ae them Scoats whoor mair Anglish than the Anglish themselves, ken whi Ah mean. Huv wan oan me, by the waye.

I wouldn’t normally post here (I usually either agree with enough so that adding anything would seem irrelevant, or lack the enthusiasm for tackling the nutters), but I have to say it’s nice to see the bigots coming out.

You can blame Scotland for your ill-governance all you want, but please take a minute to also square yourselves up to the reality that even when you had the wealth of our oil and gas revenues you still managed to hand it to a government incapable of doing anything other than royally fucking it up.

It’s a nice trade-off in terms of cultural bartering though; historically, we gave you the Enlightenment – the best you could do was Locke; we gave you the bounty of the North Sea – you gave us 18 years of Tory rule. Thanks for that.

It’s true what they say, I suppose – the English get their history from Shakespeare, their religion from Milton, and their outdated, delusional sense of superiority from a long eclipsed empire.

Hi Craig,

You say: “I had already noted that the election result and the Lib-Con coalition will be a great boost to Scottish independence. This puts the seal on it.”

That’s a remarkably hopeful affirmation. I hope that you’re right. Could you expand a little on your reasons to think so, please. Cheers! RhG

12.5% of the cabinet seats for 8.4% of the population?

Sounds like you’ve got a good deal to me especially as you’ve also got devolution.

12.5% of the cabinet seats for 8.4% of the population?

Sounds like you’ve got a good deal to me especially as you’ve also got devolution.

Hey, anonymous poster at 3:52pm, I dig yer spirit! Sock it to ‘em!

Half the election was just a “get rid of Gordon Brown because he’s Scottish” hate-fest.

He did a lot of things i disagreed with, but most people in England only seemed to care that he wasn’t English.

The whole Gillian Duffy thing was a Sky News and Sun Newspaper organised set-up too.

TV stations don’t usually use mikes that have long enough ranges for them to recieve anything once the interviewee has gone off to their car – and the interviewers usually take the mike back at the end of the interview.

Gillian Duffy was offered tens of thousands by the Sun newspaper to say she was going to vote Cameron (but refused)

Craig E – “I am a bit surprised (Aye Right!) at the tone of some of the commenst above and their anti Scots remarks.”

Are you ? Do you live in Scotland, by any chance ? The Scots conversations, understandings, of this are way, *way* ahead of what you’re likely to hear in England; the above samples are not unrepresentative of the sort of things I hear, when I raise it (which I do. I’ve been seeing this for the last several years, and it bothers me). The language above may be cruder, being as the people I talk with are, of course, naice people (irrelevant-selfmockery alert), but the sense is, they have not even begun to think about it and dislike the suggestion that they should have to. What I tend to hear is that they read the SNP as a regional variant of the BNP, Scots nationalism means hating the English, kind of thing. The next step is to notice that losing the Scots influence would weaken things that they like in currently-the-UK – permanent English Tory majority, etc (who knows how that might go, now ? I’m guessing there could be all kinds of strange splits among the parties. But, another thread for that) – and conclude that they’re against Scots independence because it would be bad for England. And, regardless of how much we agree on pretty much anything else, I can’t seem to persuade anyone that from the POV of those considering their own independence, this is *really* not a convincing argument against it; or that that matters.

It does seem to be becoming more and more likely (mostly by default, south of the border), and if it does come about, I have no idea what “the English” will do when it finally sinks in. Maybe they’ll continue to not want to think about it and shrug their shoulders. I hope.

@Duncan McFarlane,

Before I saw the footage I had thought the ‘bigot’ event was probably a setup. Having seen the footage of it though there’s nothing at all surprising in that it got picked up and went out live accidentally.

Brown was talking to her in the open right next to the car. Immediately after they stop talking he waved at the crowd (I think) and stepped into the car. That he still had the microphone on him is not surprising – it was filmed a photo-op. Then before the car drives off (or just as it is starting to) you hear the ‘bigot’ bit.

The remarkable part is that this seems to be a case of someone who was not deliberately Murdoched.

It’s interesting that a ‘popular’ story like the bigot one should get so much attention. Yet Brown seems to have got away with deceptive two-faced positions like the following with no media comment.

“No one on this side of the Atlantic ?” arguably no one on earth except Alan Greenspan – bears as much responsibility for this crisis as Gordon Brown. In 2004 he told an audience of bankers that “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”(16). In 2007 he boasted that the City of London’s success was the result of the government “enhancing a risk based regulatory approach, as we did in resisting pressure for a British Sarbannes-Oxley after Enron and Worldcom”. Even as analysts warned that a crash was due, he continued to deregulate the City and appoint its villainous bosses to government committees and quangos.”

[http://www.celsias.com/article/uks-gordon-brown-has-decided-bankers-wont-be-regul/]

Richard (5:27 PM)

I’ve thought about it, can’t see what all the fuss is about actually.

My one opinion would be that the Scots would be mad to base their economy on oil (which is all you ever seem to hear about down here from the nats etc). You need something better, mainly because the price of oil is so volatile (making it hard to budget and a chaotic way of governing).

Having said that, Scotland wants independence, NP as far as I’m concerned.

Gove is a Scot

Chris – the sums on the economy, I have no idea. But I’m sure there would be people demanding to see the hard detailed work before the case could be made to do it.

I don’t even have much idea how much oil is left under the UK sectors of the north sea.

Hi Richard

I don’t know how much oil is down there either (and if I was brutally honest, it was something I forgot to think about until you mentioned it).

I think I was coming from a diff direction, in a previous thread Craig said “Spending in Scotland has never exceeded Scotland’s hydrocarbon revenues.” I did query that, but it was an old thread so he probably didn’t see it. It does seem to perpetuate the belief amongst many that Scotland could survive on it, but it is way to unstable to rely on IMHO.

Looking at the HMRC figures, oil/gas revenue for 08/09 was just short of 13 Bn, in 09/10 it was actually 6.5 Bn, how can you possibly plan for that sort of fluctuation.

Now, if I was in charge up there (you’ll probably be glad I’m not when you read this ), I would say that all normal public spending must be met by non-oil taxation. The I would plough all that oil money into:

a. Manufacturing (mainly in the centre to East of the Country).

b. Build loads of world class ports on the East coast, especially near to the border.

c. Build highly efficient (Government owned) merchant shipping, thus ensuring that you can keep the transportation costs of the goods you produce to a minimum (and work for the ship yards up there as well).

In other words, Scotland has a long term advantage that should really be utilised (an Eastern sea board providing a gateway to Europe).

Chris – at first glance, that seems sensible, but I don’t have time to think. It’s a nice, big, thing to think about and I slightly regret my judgement in starting it just now, being as how I’ll be away for pretty much the next fortnight, so I have to drop it now. Family holiday in honour of big parental birthday, then off to the Orkney Folk Festival (Which Of Course Is Not Scotland … I shouldn’t have said that either, should I ? If anyone else happens to be up there, I’ll be the one carrying the clarinet case with the “Pict” sticker. Or that …), back after that.

Fades away, leaving only a cheerfully evil grin. Have fun.

You have fun up there

With only 1 Scots Tory MP it could have been worse.

I doubt if 9 out of 10 Scots could tell you anything about Liam Fox let alnne hate him.